programming, computer graphics, game engines, etc…

New Sideproject, C# Engine?

Motivation

Since I am now slowly getting settled down again after moving to Dublin, I have recently been thinking about starting a new side project. Doing side projects is a very natural hobby for me that allows me to play freely with ideas and gives me that cosy feeling of steady progress.
First, I thought about continuing with global illumination research (which I did in my master’s thesis) or helping out my friends at the amazing ezEngine. However, I realized that it might be fun to experiment with general infrastructure myself – something that I haven’t done for a long time. While the past showed me that I tend not to reuse code directly, there are many pieces of code in my archive that get recycled and improved in other projects – so it could be also useful for spin-offs etc.
My job involves mainly C++ coding atm, so I would rather use something else: I was tempted to use the Rust language but I am just too much in love with IDEs to try a large project with a fancy new language (note to myself: Blog about experiences with Rust). Instead I decided to go with an old friend of mine: C#

C# Pro/Cons

Personally, the biggest pros are the great IDE support (ReSharper makes it even better) and the lush standard library. Practically all engines I have seen so far have a huge Core of basic functionality for containers, threads/tasks, SIMD math, file access and so on. In .net there is already a lot of this stuff; 4.6 has even basic SIMD support, a work stealing task scheduler and the async functionalities are just a amazing! Don’t take me wrong, writing all this by hand can be a joy on its own, but I am just not in the mood for it ;).
Also, I have to admit that I just love some of the syntactical sugar of C#, e.g. properties, lambdas, events, …

On the other hand the garbage collector can strike at any time and can make it difficult to manage resource & lifetimes by hand where it is necessary (textures, buffers, but also high-level game resource management). Another con from my point of view is that I already now quite a bit about C#/.Net stuff which makes the whole matter a bit less interesting. On the other hand, recent versions introduced some cool stuff. Cross-Platform support is getting with Microsoft’s more recent open source initiatives really good, but I am still sceptical.

Things to try

A loose list of a few interesting things to which I look especially forward to investigate and experiment with during this project:

Modern multi-threaded renderer abstraction

Support for DX12, Vulkan but also OpenGL 4.5 (to prove the concept and make it work on my laptop)

might be necessary to keep the lowest abstraction level relatively high

Molecule Matters has a great series about this topic with many super interesting ideas. Can’t wait to try all this in C# 🙂

Resource system/manager

Component Entity systems

Especially interesting in the context of .net reflection stuff

Unit-testing in .net

Modern Scenegraph

Run on Linux without Mono

Make a WinRT application

…

Of course there will be also a lot of seemingly less exiting things that still might be fun, but to which I haven’t given much thought yet. For example logging, messaging, special data structures, etc.

Next, I will have a look at existing engines and start then experimenting & planning with the general project structure. While .net offers already a lot of stuff I will probably still need some kind of base library. As always, I will make everything public on GitHub.